Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, making subtle alternations and juxtapositions to reference modernist design, Minimalist sculpture, street subcultures, and roadside Americana. To great effect, Handforth plays representation against abstraction, the rough against the refined, and art history against itself. He frequently exhibits multiple works at once, making installations of casual associativeness that, as 2004 Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer notes, “suggest a constant state of flux—a process of being rearranged, constructed, and dismantled all at once.” This was literally true of earlier works, such as Not from where I'm standing, exhibited at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. That installation comprised a tower of industrial scaffolding that acted as a screen on which an ever-changing array of objects were installed or hung. More recently, that sense of flux occurs in the mind, as the viewer becomes progressively more cognizant of the multiple quotations implanted in each work. However, it is no small feat that, unlike Simon Starling, whose highly conceptual work inevitably requires careful explication, Handforth never loses sight of the value of aesthetic pleasure. He delights in a narrow range of materials—exotic woods, industrially fabricated metals, fluorescent lights covered by colored gels, multicolored candles—that are deployed to very specific effect. The result is an art that, as Singer writes, is “equal parts suburban alienation and modernist transcendence.”

Given Handforth's consistent engagement with Minimalist sculpture—no matter that only some of his works resemble Minimalist objects—it can be rewarding to examine part of his oeuvre through the dominant lens by which that earlier generation was viewed: phenomenology. A recent Artforum article by art historian James Meyer posits that for many contemporary sculptors a relationship to the spectacularly sized gallery space has replaced a direct engagement with the viewer's body. At the tail end of a half-century genealogy of this transition, Meyer cites Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses and the sculptors who have filled Tate Modern's grand Turbine Hall as artists for whom “...an aesthetic of size...has subsumed a Minimalist concept of scale.” Yet Handforth's art is an exception to this trend, with many of his works splitting the difference between the two poles while falling outside of Meyer's chronological spectrum. As physical objects, Miami Kiosk (1998) and DiamondBrite (2004) can be placed somewhere between the somatic works of Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, and others in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and the oversized sculptures by Tony Smith, Ronald Bladen, and Barnett Newman in Scale as Content at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967: they're big enough to seem awkwardly stuffed into the gallery space yet not so large as to fully alienate a viewing body. (In fact, the exact opposite of alienation occasionally happens: one widely circulated picture of Miami Kiosk features children playing on top of it.) It is conceivable that Handforth really performed a David-versus-Goliath showdown with the highway sign—just as fellow Biennial artist Wade Guyton wrestled with Marcel Breuer chairs—to make DiamondBrite, generating its torqued form by hand. Handforth's objects privilege neither viewer nor gallery space, thereby completing the Minimalist task of making the viewer physically aware not only of the object, but the space in which it resides.

Yet Handforth slyly embeds too many quotations in his works for us to rely on formal analysis alone. He draws from high and low sources: the graceful curves of Freebird (2000) call to mind Alexander Calder's mobiles, but the title comes from Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band from the artist's adopted home of Florida. Likewise the sculpture is made from the streetlamps found all across the country, but the artist's longstanding interest in modernist interior design connects this work to Achille Castiglioni's canonic 1962 Arco Floor Lamp (itself a part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection). Even the simplest of Handforth's objects, arrangements of fluorescent tubes distributed across a wall, open an arena of complicated interpretation. Perhaps more than any other modern artist, Dan Flavin laid singular and lasting claim to his chosen medium, and it takes bravura to rush into this hallowed territory. Even more so considering the decorative end to which Handforth has deployed the material: one work presented the Union Jack across a gallery wall and several others Jesus' cross. Representation, however frought with its own meaning, is slipped into the work. (Another way to put it: he takes representation off the cross on which modernist abstraction had tried to nail it.) Handforth brings Flavin's ephemeral transcendence (and his latent, secular spirituality) back to Earth: the enlightening glow of an expansive empire, represented by its flag, and Jesus' beatific, radiant presence are invoked by humble, commercially available materials.

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